[Gllug] entropykey: why did nobody ever mention this thing before?

[Andrew Farnsworth]

I know several people who have used large quantities of random numbers and
could definitely have used something like this as they were running out.  In
case anyone wants to know what running out means, it means looping around
and starting the list over.  If you have not used the random number
generator in most PCs and Languages today, you may not realise that they are
really pseudo random in that they are generated using a formula on a seed
number to get a new number which it returns as the random result and then
uses the new number as a seed for the next.  This produces a very long
string of numbers that to all intents and purposes is random... unless you
use so many of them that the algorithm starts back over on the list of
numbers.  My friend was a PhD candidate and was seeing patterns in her data
that just could not be explained, she finally tracked it down to the random
number generator and the fact that she was using orders of magnitude more
numbers than the algorithm could produce.  She ended up buying a very large
set of random numbers (who would have thought that was a product) so it is
nice to see this type of setup where you can get random numbers generated
simply and easily.  She probably would have still purchased the large block
of random numbers as she was using them much faster than the Key here would
generate them so it was better for her to purchase a large block than to
have to wait for the numbers to be generated.

For more information... see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generation

Andy
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